Qualcomm no longer has anything to fear, at least for now, when it comes to ARM’s attempts to assert license violations through the latest generations of its processors for smartphones and especially PCs. However, ARM doesn’t want to completely admit defeat yet.
ARM has lost out in the long-awaited court case against Qualcomm for allegedly violating its license terms. The court in the US state of Delaware ruled in favor of Qualcomm on two of three key points in ARM’s lawsuit. Accordingly, it has been decided for the time being that Qualcomm did not violate ARM’s licensing terms by purchasing the startup company Nuvia.
According to the jury in the trial, the use of the technologies developed by Nuvia does not constitute a violation of the license agreements between Qualcomm and ARM. On the last point, which essentially concerns Nuvia’s activities, which ARM also sees as a violation of its license conditions, The jury could not come to a decision in favor of either party. ARM now has no further opportunity to take action against Qualcomm, at least in the first few points.
Since the jury has not reached a decision on the third point, ARM has already announced in response to the preliminary outcome of the Delaware proceedings that it intends to take further legal action. Although the responsible judge warned that ARM would probably not be successful again, the British chip design specialist does not want to let this dissuade him from his plan.
For Qualcomm, the Delaware jury’s decisions mean, at least for now, that the company does not have to fear any consequences from the takeover of Nuvia. The US chip giant bought the startup company a good five years ago. It was founded by a number of former Apple employees after they laid the foundations for Apple’s gigantic success with custom CPUs for iPhone, iPad and now also Mac desktops and notebooks. After the acquisition, Qualcomm used the Nuvia team to develop its own, highly customized ARM processors with significantly increased performance.
There is a lot at stake for Qualcomm, after all, the company has staked its future on the work of the Nuvia developers. Together with Microsoft, they now offer a series of ARM-based chips for notebooks in the form of the Snapdragon X series. Qualcomm’s latest high-end chip for smartphones like the Galaxy S25 series also goes back to the work of the former Nuvia team.
